On 17 March, 13.15–15.00, LUCK is organizing the seminar “Peer Review in the Humanities: Evaluative Practices from the 19^th to the 21^st century”. It will be a hybrid seminar: LUX:A332 or Zoom (https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/2108272169)

About the seminar
Peer review, i.e. the institutionalized evaluation of scholars and their outputs by others working in the same field, is fundamental to knowledge production and research evaluation in the present-day humanities. However, the origins and development of humanities peer review remain remarkably poorly understood, particularly in comparison to the history of peer review in the natural and social sciences.

This panel aims to bridge this knowledge gap by exploring the historical evolution of peer review in the humanities, combining an introduction to the subject by Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt with a closer look at the Swedish evaluation of docents in the 19^th and 20^th centuries (Isak Hammar and Hampus Östh Gustafsson).

Introduction: Scholar-to-scholar evaluation in the humanities (Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Lund/Ghent)

The history of peer review in the humanities extends beyond the formal processes of article review, which today function as gatekeeping mechanisms, key indicators of ‘scientificity’, and proxies for quality. Humanities scholars have long evaluated each other’s work in a variety of institutionalised ways and contexts, each constituting an important facet of the history of peer review in the humanities—defined here as a set of loosely connected disciplines that investigate human culture and history. This introduction thus explores how different forms of ‘scholar-to-scholar evaluation’ in the humanities have overlapped and influenced one another, all while being shaped by broader developments in the academic world. Beginning with seminars in the 19th century, progressing through early 20th-century book and article reviews, and advancing to formal review processes in the 21st century, the crucial question is what has changed and what has remained constant in the evaluation of humanities scholarship.

The Elusive ‘Docent Grade’: Evaluative Cultures in and Beyond the Swedish Humanities (1876–1969) (Isak Hammar, Lund, and Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Uppsala/Lund)

In the late nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, an academic career in Sweden was highly dependent on the grade awarded to a scholar’s doctoral dissertation. Without receiving a so-called “docent grade”, essentially declaring the scholar eligible to seek the title of docent (associate professor), the prospects of maintaining an academic career were bleak. Throughout the period, this largely uncodified gate-keeping practice provoked controversy, at times extending beyond closed faculty boardrooms into public arenas such as periodicals and newspapers. Moreover, conflicts over grades could expose tensions between opposing intellectual traditions, regional cultures of knowledge, and political camps. This article explores the development of the combined doctor/docent assessment and investigates instances when customary practice was challenged, for example, when female docents or applicants with foreign credentials entered the system. By tracing the long history of the docent grade and the debates it spurred, the article aims to highlight early and alternative forms of peer evaluation in the humanities, with a particular focus on the assessment of early-career academics. These historical perspectives will enrich ongoing discussions on evaluative practices in academia and also open up new ways of thinking about how peer review might be organised in the future.

Image: “Uil met bril en boeken”, Cornelis Bloemaert (c. 1625), Rijksmuseum, Netherlands